As the world watched the global economy melt down—through hubris and a startling erosion of the New Deal–era regulations that tamed capitalism after the Great Depression—many millennial-age Americans were drawn to Harvey’s lectures on YouTube, including an animated video, viewed millions of times, that explains the breakdown of the subprime housing market. After years of challenging students to read Marx and to value strenuous engagement with primary texts, Harvey became an unlikely icon for activists, protesters, and, eventually, the Occupy movement in the United States and Europe. Crucially, he showed how housing became a new asset traded on Wall Street—first, through bundled mortgages and, after 2008, via the buying frenzy of firms like Blackstone that purchased distressed homes to become one of America’s biggest landlords in just 10 years. Most importantly, Harvey encouraged younger people not just to flirt with Marxism but to read the man himself.
Tracing technological innovation and the quickening pace of financial markets, The Story of Capital elegantly shows the need for Marx in the twenty-first century, as artificial intelligence portends mass unemployment and as global markets stray from real assets toward “fictitious capital,” such as holdings of meme stocks and cryptocurrencies. Harvey, channeling Marx, shows how financiers in 2026 are completely unable and unwilling to stave off future crises, and gestures toward what can be done.
A theory of capitalism that can focus on the de-skilling and replacement of human workers is much more illuminating than a celebratory account of humming assembly lines.
This is not to say that Marx thought that industrialization, mechanization, or globalization were bad things. He was no Luddite. His concern was the disconnect between profits and human need: Much like today’s industrial regions, the slums of nineteenth-century Manchester that Marx observed were filled with workers who were exhausted, unhealthy, and miserable while the factory owners dined on beef bourguignon and claret in their mansions. The factories these days just happen to be in Shenzhen or Dhaka, not the other side of town. Unlike the British machine wreckers of a generation before, Marx saw no way to stuff the technological genie back into the bottle. New tools must be utilized for the greatest good: Instead of getting rid of the factories, the public should take ownership of them.
This complicates Marx’s vision. Yet faulty sequencing does not mean he was necessarily wrong. In this century and the last, Marx’s critics have painted him as a Eurocentric philosopher, who believed every nation would have to go through industrialization and capitalism as European countries had, in order to get to revolution and eventual communism. As Harvey observes, capitalism may have started in Europe, and that perhaps makes it a “Eurocentric” idea, but now it is practiced nearly everywhere in the world.
Another great asset of engaging with Marx, through Harvey’s guided tour, is that it allows us to think outside of the value-neutral rational choice theory of economics of our own times, which imagines people as big fleshy calculators assessing cost-benefit maximization in every instance, as if people act in their own self-interest and those actions somehow even out to form a balanced and just universe. Rather, capitalism has a constant problem of overusing resources. As Harvey puts it: “Individual capitalists operating in their own self-interest and seeking to maximize their profit undermine the sustainability of capital accumulation in general through their suboptimal but economically rational decision-making.” That is to say that one person’s great good luck of making a windfall from cutting down an Indonesian teak forest is most likely detrimental to quite a few other people, not to mention plants and animals. Harvey continues by observing:
When the promise of risk mitigation is based on the “natural order” of individuals pursuing their unfettered interest and ignoring the so-called negative externalities, you quickly get a world in which profits are not shared but risk is collectivized.
Most of all, Harvey communicates the hopefulness of Marx. He still wants to spread one of Marx’s most important messages: “Collectively, we can indeed change this world.”
Like Marx himself, Harvey has always been more of a teacher than a futurologist. Getting people to engage with ideas and truly do the work of critical reading is the first transformative step to building political power and a new society. The process of deep reading and analysis is a luxury that more people would enjoy under socialism. If work was less mentally and physically draining, people could develop themselves more fully than being just a wage laborer or a petty-bourgeois professional. Indeed, Marx famously promised that in the post-capitalist world “it is possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner,” without having to take on any one thing as an identity or caste-like label.
The only possible, if implausible, way to save capital from the finance capitalists would be the evolution of a systemically deflationary, low-growth economy in which Keynes’s “euthanasia of the rentiers” is coupled with Marx’s dream of the “expropriation of the expropriators” (that is, the billionaire class). Hints of what such an economy might look like can be found in the deflationary low-growth history of the Japanese economy after the speculative crash of 1990.
Harvey has always eschewed Marx as a political-economic seer, and he puts forth the view that we should appreciate his prescience, writing from 175 years ago, rather than his (limited) bad hunches. Most of all, Harvey communicates the hopefulness of Marx. Refreshingly, despite the state of the world and of the United States, David Harvey still wants to spread one of Marx’s most important messages: “Collectively, we can indeed change this world, even though, as Marx points out, this is never done under conditions of our own choosing.”
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